Cambridge Coincidences Collection

Professor David Spiegelhalter of Cambridge University wants to know about your coincidences!

Coincidences have always followed us where we have been and still do - I guess if you are gregarious and talk to people it is bound to happen.
On a trip to China in 1996, there were 40 of us in agroup from all over the UK. One of the travellers asked me where we lived - after some generalisation he asked me the name of our village in Gloucestershire - when I told him he said his wife worked in the same village at the agricultural stores some 500 yards away from our home. When I asked where he lived he said Pittville in Cheltenham - somebody on the next table said where?

I had gone into town shopping some years ago. Whilst walking past a bank of about 6 telephone boxes, one of them started to ring, being the nosie so and so I am, I picked it up. Now remember im in the middle of town along with hundreds of other people, it was my brother on the other end of the phone. He had dialed the wrong number and got the phone box that I answered!!!!

I was married on 28th September 1974 (we'd altered the date from our first choice of the 21st to fit in with my father-in-law's job.) It was only whilst researching my family tree much later that I found that my grandparents had been married on 28th September 1924 - exactly 50 years to the day before my own wedding.

My paternal grandfather was a pit pony master in a mine in Yorkshire.
My wife's maternal grandfather was a pit pony master in a mine in South Wales.
Both were long dead before we met and had no connection to each other in any way.
Considering this is a fairly rare occupation it is rather odd but the coincidence ends there.
I don't like horses but my wife loves them.

I have a daughter born on 16th November 1957
My son was born 3years and 3 minutes later 16th November 1960
My Father died on the 13th February 1983
my Mother died on the 13th February 2000
When I married my second husband in 1969 we realised that we had both been born in the same nursing home Twyford Lodge Willesden, although we lived in different areas and it took us 30 years to meet

My friend & I were out for a drink one evening about 23 years ago, & I heard American voices behind us. Being the nosy type, I turned & asked what part of the USA the elderly couple were from. Their response was that I had probably not heard of Lincoln, Nebraska. To their surprise I told them that my daughter had recently started studying on a swimming scholarship at that very university. The man turned out be the architect who designed the building Allison was studying in!

My sister who lives in Florida sent me a cook book for Christmas 2011, called 660 Curries. It was a book she already had herself. I emailed her after Christmas to tell her which curry I had made for my first recipe from the book and she called me immediately to say that the recipe I had chosen to make for my first curry was the same recipe she had chosen to make for her first one. It was called Vibrant Chicken in a Spicy Tomato Sauce. For us both to choose the same recipe out of 660 was mind blowing.

In 1993 I arrived in a hostel in Sydney Australia and within an hour met a Dutch guy called Kees Van Gelderen . We spent 5 days having a laugh in Sydney before he went to Canberra to see long lost relatives . I spent the next three weeks in Melbourne then Adelaide and then got on the bus I'd selected to take me up to Coober Pedy on route to Alice Springs . I sat down in my allocated seat 36a . Kees got on within minutes and sat in his allocated seat ;36b .
Late on the same trip as I was travelling down the East coast I met a girl from the U.K.

Having married 1st time to a woman born on 26/july/1943 divorced and remarried a 2nd time to a woman born on the same date 26/july/1943.
Mother died and the house was sold to a couple by the name John and Linda Robertson, John being my name, Linda being my wife's name and Robertson being my mother's nee name!